


In the heat of the moment and the vacuum that follows

by Artemis_Crimson



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Edit: ACTUALLY FUCK IT I CALL ROMANCE ON THIS BITCH, Gen, Isolation, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin, it was originally meant to be em/outsider but I fucked up, low-key tho, now it's more finding solace in the other people like you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 19:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16959894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Crimson/pseuds/Artemis_Crimson
Summary: In which curses and perspectives shift





	In the heat of the moment and the vacuum that follows

Emily Kaldwin is a cold woman.  
She is ten years old and the eyes of men long dead fall on her. She is stolen by a red, red man and people in pointy masks that stink sweet of oil and blood. She’s hidden in a bathhouse for months and months and is very literally climbing the walls by week three, only sparing her fingers because she obviously needs something to draw with now and to write decrees condemning these people when she breaks free later.  
The night before Corvo comes to get her she dreams of being a pirate, on the blurry deck of her own ship, a hazy horizon with no walls to hold her in, sea spray stinging her face in perfect detail. The whole coup feels like a nightmare, a dream really, the stench of bodies burning from the plague follows her for years but the heat of the fires and the fevers never touches her.  
She is eighteen when it fades and the eyes of her dear father follow her as she races above rooftops in the biting Dunwall night.  
He watches her and trains her. The eyes of an empire pass over her face everyday, her face stamped into tons of precious metals that pass through millions of hands. Her Father looks at her with the same see-through disapprove, veiled in a different way from that of the court but there all the same. She knows that he loves her like a parent, loves her like an empress and it should be enough.  
Emily is gazed upon by the whole world but it’s only as a nighttime ghost when she’s certain not even her dutiful royal protector can find her does she feel seen.

Her rule feels like a dream, hazy disoriented and like it she’s wrong for wanting more. Like her mother was the waking world real and vibrant and she is the chilled sea fog-bank of fantasy. Pale in comparison.

Emily is 25 and she meets the eyes of a witch, her aunt, most ambitious women in the isles, as cunning and clever as they come. Delilah is brilliant and powerfully confident and charming, she’s the perfect empress. She’s cruel and idealistic with the will to make it all real. Like every ruler who has the misfortune of being a women she’s been underestimated since the day she was born. Delilah makes allies of those who shared that same fate of never being seen. Delilah is a champion.  
Delilah nonetheless overlooks and underestimates Emily. It’s her only mistake. It’s enough.

Emily is 25 and the black eyes of a god have been watching her for more of her life than they haven’t, there is no timeline where she isn’t pivotal. She’s seen them in dreams where gravity isn’t real and whales bleed power. Now she see's him in person. The Void is cold, The Outsider more so, his mark burns with all the heat Emily has left to give in one final glorious flare and then she’s just as cold as them. Cold as a corpse in this undream. She ignores it as it happens, too delighted with the second greater gift of her mother's voice, almost forgotten but perfectly preserved.

It sinks in slowly for Emily in the waking world, she knows it wasn’t her imagination, that it wasn't panic when the heavy layers of cloth that once sheltered her from the Gristol bite don’t boil her in Karnaca heat. When she checks for a pulse and finds the guardsmen hot as a brand. When the actual fires never burn as much as they should. When a foolish mistake leaves her in the centre of an explosion and when she walks away from it not wholly unscathed but, since the solid brick wall next to her is cracked open like an egg and her skull isn’t, she might as well have. It grows the more shrines she finds, after finding the ones on Addermire she realizes just how different she’s becoming. Emily sinks into a shadow that day and later that evening when she shares bottles of cider and soda with the good doctor and the captain she see’s that her bottle has covered itself in condensation and flecks of ice. The Void feels warm when she dreams now.

Emily finds a house out of time, cracks a lock meant to be unbreakable out of her last clinging bit of childish pettiness. Over a grudge with a man who will never know a thought he can grasp again. At Addermire it felt like mercy, easy to stay her hand. But now as she walks through a gang war it just feels cold. Like everything else. The Howlers and The Overseers still battle when she slips in and will battle when she slips out. It’s a lingering ever growing frustration that makes her leave them to their own devices for now, she can’t leave problems forever, this coup has taught her this but it’s exhausting to have everyone in your empire at each other’s throats. Bone deep weariness and the concessions it brings are the few things she feels in the real world besides. She thinks of their corpses, Paolo and Bryce ripped apart by rats like so many had been in Dunwall years before and for the first time in months something warm blooms in her gut.

Once through the gate Silton’s mansion sucks the air from her lungs and makes her feel feverish. She’s hollow and human and her head hurts. No magic comes to answer her call when she attempts to grind her bones down into shadow out of reflex.  
She hates how weak it makes her feel and how dependent she’s become on her mark. Emily takes another gift from a god slowly growing hers and the throbbing pulse in her skull echos into a strange new song. When their fingers brush together the Outsider feels warm, the same as her. Then he pulls her from an endless fall and tells her how he died and his presence feels all too human.

Meagan notices. Emily knows she does. Knows that her strange ally has knowledge of what the icy power humming in her veins means, even if she doesn’t care to share how or why just yet. Maybe she's just been with her long enough to notices the changes. Hypatia is too tired to know even if her other side had sensed something before she'd cut it out of her. Stilton who she saved easy as dancing, easing her woes before they began, easy as she moved though time- is still touched by the void but he doesn’t know what to make of it. Her enemies had grasped blankly at it too, she had smiled once at a doppelgänger as Jindosh worried right through the answer that she really was in two places at once. Brienna never even saw her before she’d had her gifts ripped away, Emily knew what the witches used was a pale shadow of her power, of Delilah’s but Brienna's connection had lasted for years. She also knew now what it felt like to have it ripped away from you, like the air in your lungs turned to salt. She’d knocked out every witch there, stolen away Delilah’s lovers magic and with a new sort of spite she hoped it stung the wound that was all of them.

Emily Kaldwin was more sea breeze and shade than a person as she raced into the Duke Abel’s palace, no conscious magic required. After a childhood running up and down the precarious towers, bridges and spires of Dunwall this is the easiest thing she’s done so far. Her father would have a fit at the piss-poor excuse for security and she almost has fun sliding across the roof. It feels like it's been years since there's been a whisper of joy in this but that can't be right. Her spirits are still light when she pulls out the heart and arranges a coup, secure in her new certainties. The new Duke will owe her. The new Duke will do his job well out of loyalty to the people if not out of loyalty to her. The new Duke fears what she might do if he doesn’t. A glimmer of power, not even as much as Meagan has seen is all she offers. It’s all she needs. High on hopes and hubris it’s ripped away as her mother leaves her all over again.  
An empty vessel of flesh and bone that holds a spirit. The Heart, a body. It’s with otherworldly certainty she knows that it is all the same in the end but only one of the two she carries has room for Delilah in it. Her mother is already gone and there’s no room left for sentiment now so she crams that wretched thing in and hopes it’s an uncomfortable cage the whole way back home.

The journey back to Gristole is quiet, the sea doesn't toss The Dreadful Wale despite the ever-present storms and more pods of whales than should exist this close to the slaughterhouse homelands follow them. It’s only on the Wrenhaven shore, at the very end of it all that Billie Lurk offers her past to Emily, looking for something only an Empress can give in return. Emily forgives her out of memory of her mother’s kindness. She doesn’t have it in her to hate someone new. She finds she doesn’t have it in her to hate Delilah anymore as she ascends her tower, stashing pigments, skulls and spells in her belt.

She'd expected a nightmare, she'd made notes of her mortality but it’s so easy to beat her it’s disconcerting, with the melted to Heart dust and its cargo back home in her chest, for all her bragging and clawing Delilah is just, human.  
Emily hasn’t been something so dull since she woke up on Karnca’s shores.  
(Emily hasn’t ever been something so limited.)

Empress Emily Kaldwin is a cold woman born to two wildfires, the void chose her as a child. She claimed an Empire as a child and she held her reign for longer than her mother could through just as much unrest. The mistake Delilah-no-one-more-ambitious-or-cunning made months ago, her only one in her adult life comes back to bite and robs her of the chance to struggle or try again. That her canny cold survival instinct wasn’t meant for the sort of power she wanted. She’d never learn she lost herself to a delusion and painted ghosts.  
Emily just wakes up her father and works to clean up the mess.  
She stops waiting for something in her to thaw.

**Author's Note:**

> Delilah being wrong voice: Clearly I am the most important of the marked, the outsider favours me  
> Emily: exists


End file.
